10/11/2010 @ 6:00AM

The Future Of E-Mail

Executives at social networking and messaging companies are in almost total agreement that e-mail as we know it will disappear in the near future, replaced instead by texting. There’s only one problem with their conclusion–they’re wrong.

Texting is the latest evolution of instant or short-burst messaging. The attraction is that you don’t necessarily have to be at a computer or load a particular messenger service, such as AOL,
Yahoo
,
Google
or Skype. You can simply send it directly to a phone number, and with 1 billion mobile phones sold each year, it’s pretty much a certainty that you can get a message to almost anyone on the planet relatively quickly.

Texting certainly has a valid place in the electronic babblesphere, just as instant messaging has a place. In work groups, short messages that pop up on your screen are quicker to read and respond to than regular e-mail. It’s also less formal. Inside some companies, when the message disappears, it’s gone for good.

That’s not true at all companies, though. Some IT departments keep records of instant messages sent by employees for legal reasons. Inside those organizations, anything sent from a work computer to another work computer is governed by the same rules of legal liability as a formal document. That makes it hard to discern what’s e-mail vs. instant messaging, other than the service used to deliver the message.

So far there are few rules involving texting, but there will be plenty more in the future. An employee who sends a text on company time to another person raises the same kind of legal liability issues as if they sent an e-mail or a handwritten letter. And unless the recipient deletes the message, it tends to stick around, just like e-mail–in some cases, until they get a new phone, sometimes even longer.

This is particularly troublesome for companies because employees tend to use their phones for personal reasons as well as corporate business. It simply doesn’t make sense to carry around two devices when most calling plans for employees offer unlimited voice and text. The big issue isn’t the cost of the plan; it’s the cost of doing something that violates corporate policy with the device.

One solution being proposed by technology companies is to create physical walls within their devices–all the way down to segmenting the cores in multicore processors–so that phones, PCs and everything in between can shift from a personal mode to a work mode. There are security reasons for making this happen, because it safeguards corporate data from anyone who hacks into the device via personal texting. It also potentially can limit corporate exposure to any messages an employee sends on personal time, even though no legal precedent exists for this kind of dual-mode operation.

Nevertheless, there is a growing recognition inside of many companies that a potential problem exists. The lines are blurring between devices used to send the messages as well as the applications being used to create the messages. But given the infrastructure used to monitor the messages, whether it’s a text or a classic Outlook e-mail, there will be almost no difference between the content of a text or instant message and an e-mail other than the messages may be sent in short bursts instead of a more fully composed message. In fact, the only real difference may be the size of the document, the number of recipients included on the message thread and the attachments that go along with it.

It all still carries the same liability and security risk, and it all warrants the same kind of scrutiny. From a corporate standpoint, it’s all still e-mail, and always will be.

Ed Sperling is the editor of several technology trade publications and has covered technology for more than 20 years. Contact him at esperlin@yahoo.com.